Plastics are increasingly used as a material for packaging, vessels or other products of a relatively short serviceable life, so that more and more corresponding waste arises. It is desirable to lead this waste to a recycling chain for various reasons. Firstly, it is in the interest of the protection of the environment to minimize waste and in particular to sort away materials which are harmful to the environment. On the other hand it makes economic sense to recycle valuable material.
A first step in a recycling chain is to recognize the different substances, in order to then be able to lead them to the correct recycling processes. Methods for automatically identifying different plastic types for this purpose have not yet established themselves. For example, in order to ascertain from which sort of plastic the empty containers are manufactured, these until now had to be characterized accordingly, for example with the aid of a barcode.